A new UK-based site is aiming to become the IMDB for music events. Songkick.com which officially launched a few weeks ago officially in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (with limited listings for Ireland right now) is hoping to become the de facto resource for live music.
What separates Songkick from other listings sites is the emphasis on past events. So far, the site has gathered info on over one million events with the aim of documenting those great gigs of times past through posters, user-generated photos, videos, setlists and reviews. The site currently lists a whopping 2780 past Bob Dylan concerts in 772 cities with the earliest dated at the 1st of May 1960 in Minnesota and has complete tour dates for hundreds of bands including Radiohead and Sonic Youth. Even though the gig information is limited for Ireland, a quick look at Dublin throws up 3894 past events which is no small number. For the ultimate gig-going anorak, this is stats heaven.
Of course, Songkick also allows you to track your favourite artists, venues, festivals and other fans so you can know what's happening well in advance via news feeds, email and the site itself.
For those who hate participating in data entry (that would be everyone then) Songkick offers a downloadable program that will scan the library of your favourite media player (iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp) and automatically begin tracking the artists in your library on Songkick. The site's current biggest rival is probably Last.FM which has an active events section. In response to this, Songkick offers the ability for users to import your top 50 artists from that site onto Songkick.
http://www.songkick.com/
Features
Fri, Jun 26, 2009